Tim Wigmore works on the Morning Briefing email and was called a "little slave" by the Daily Politics Show. He blogs on British politics, and also contributes to ESPNcricinfo. He tweets @timwig.

Autumn Statement 2013: He's wrong-footed Labour, but George Osborne has completely failed his own tests

This must have been what they meant they said Red Ed. Given the unenviable task of responding to George Osborne, Ed Balls resembled a tomato about to explode. It sure wasn't pretty.

But here's the thing. By the standards he set out in his "unavoidable budget" in June 2010, Mr Osborne has utterly failed.

Back then, the Chancellor explained that "The formal mandate we set is that the structural current deficit should be in balance in the final year of the five-year forecast period, which is 2015-16 in this Budget." But he was going to go even faster: to eliminate the structural deficit in 2014-15. "Or to put it another way, we are on track to have debt falling and a balanced structural current budget by the end of this Parliament." The contrast with Labour, who lacked "a credible plan to reduce their record deficit" was inescapable.

Which makes what happened next rather awkward.

Not only did the Chancellor miss his target spectacularly – the ambition has now been deferred to the next Parliament – but deficit reduction has been slower than under the Alistair Darling plan he denounced as a "reckless gamble". Mr Osborne wanted the deficit down to £60 billion by 2013-14; Mr Darling's timid plan only reduced it to £85 billion by 2013-14. Today he lauded that it was down to a trifling £111 billion.

At the spending review three years ago, Mr Osborne mocked "Government plans – if you can call them that – that envisaged our national debt ratio still rising in the year 2014." But that's exactly what's happening: the ratio of national debt to GDP is still rising, and won't peak until 2015-16. Perhaps it's no wonder that Britain's Triple A credit rating – against which Mr Osborne wanted to be judged – has been lost.

Ironically, Mr Osborne's most ridiculed words – "we're all in this together" – has actually held pretty true. The burden has been shared pretty equally between rich and poor, but it hasn't been shared between ages. The ONS just revealed that income for average pensioners has grown 5.1 per cent from 2007-08 to 2011-12 – while it has fallen 6.4 per cent for average working-age people. And this is where Mr Osborne's aim "to put the whole welfare system on a more sustainable and affordable footing" has fallen flat. There's only so much you can cut welfare while leaving the majority of the budget – pensioners – untouched.

It's true that growth has returned – but at a far lower rate than the Chancellor had envisaged. In his emergency budget in 2010, he read out the OBR's growth predictions. Even with the prediction of Mr Osborne's chief of staff, Rupert Harrison, that the economy would go "gangbusters" this year, seeming right, growth every year has been well short of those predictions. The much-lauded upgrade in the OBR's growth forecast to 1.4 per cent is still only half of what the OBR originally predicted for 2013.

So why hasn't Labour exploited Mr Osborne failures? Labour's mistake was to believe that Mr Osborne really was the ruthless axeman of caricature. In fact, he's a pragmatist masquerading as an ideologue; the Chancellor relaxed his approach when they seemed unviable (for instance, by ramping up infrastructure spending). By tediously trotting out "too far and too fast" line for three years, Labour got their approach completely wrong. Rather than peddling the myth that Mr Osborne was a merciless cutter, Labour could have been much cleverer. If they'd noticed that the Chancellor was secretly changing tack, Labour could have said that Plan A had flopped – and he could only get growth by borrowing Alistair Darling's plans. Instead Labour are desperate to shift the debate onto living standards (which are an issue) because, on the big economic issues, they are completely boxed in.